Facebook and its social media rivals, despite a major shift to live-streaming, appear to be under performing at the Rio Olympics, according to MediaPost’s Media Daily News homepage.
Indeed, only 33 percent of viewers are following the games on social media, compared with 46 percent who said they planned to follow along on Facebook and other platforms. That’s according to fresh findings from Fluent, which surveyed 2,970 U.S. adults at the end of July, and 3,081 a week into August. Twitter is performing particularly poorly, the digital marketing firm found.
In fact, only 31 percent of social media users reported following this year’s Olympics via Twitter. Worse yet, only 3 percent of consumers who reported following the Olympics on social media said that Twitter is the platform they are using most often to do so.
“Even though the Olympics should theoretically be the perfect event for Twitter to capitalize on, the fact of the matter is they just haven’t been able to break through in a big way,” said Jordan Cohen, CMO at Fluent.
Not faring much better, 33 percent of social media users reported following the Olympics via Instagram, while 36 percent of respondents said they have followed via YouTube. Besting all other platforms, a full 56 percent of social media users say they have been following the Olympics on Facebook.
Among social media users, 38 percent said they didn’t have a Twitter account, while a whopping 1 in 5 said they weren’t even familiar with the platform.
“Putting social channels to shame,” Gavin O’Malley said on Media Daily News. “94 percent of viewers say they are watching the Olympics on TV, compared with only 33 percent on smartphones, tablets and computers.”
This story first appeared in the blog, The Sport Intern. The editor is Karl-Heinz Huba of Lorsch, Germany. He can be reached at ISMG@aol.com. The article is reprinted here with permission of Huba.